Spilling the Beans on Beans

One of my first tasks when I began at the GH Research Institute, back
in September, was to get the real scoop on beans for our February food
feature, Almost Vegetarian. So many of our recipes called for canned
beans that my editors thought it would be helpful to write a sidebar to
address the issue of cooking dried beans from scratch, to separate fact
from fiction.

I ate, slept, and wept beans for weeks, ferreting out any information I could find about them. How many different varieties of beans are there? Why do beans have the reputation of being "the musical fruit"? What's the best way to cook a bean? Store a bean? Freeze a bean?

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Conventional thinking states that the best way to deal with a dried bean is to soak it overnight and simmer it in a good amount of unsalted water until tender. Turns out, convention is actually pretty accurate, except for that unsalted bit.

I soaked 1 cup of dried pintos overnight, one for 6 hours, another for 4 hours, and one using a "quick soak" method (bringing dried beans and water to a boil, simmering for 3 minutes, removing them from the heat, and letting the beans sit in the hot liquid for 1 hour). I then proceeded to cook them all the same way, with 2 cups of cold unsalted water, brought to a boil, lowered to a gentle simmer, and simmered until tender.

After tasting these, the favorite was the overnight soaked batch, which seemed to have the best "bean-y" flavor and texture of the bunch.

Once we settled on the appropriate amount of soaking time, we had to address another important question: To salt or not to salt? Convention has it that salting the cooking water will toughen the beans, but when we cooked them in completely unsalted water and added a ¼ tsp. of salt at the end, the beans were bland. When we cooked them in water salted with a ¼ tsp. of salt, some of the beans became a little bitter and mealy. So how to season the bean without negatively affecting the texture? We tried stirring in an 1/8 tsp. of salt after 30 minutes of simmering and then another 1/8 tsp. at the very end. With this method, we achieved bean bliss: creamy beans with the pure, earthy flavor of nothing but beans, the salt being only enough to enhance the bean's flavor without actually tasting salty.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the whole "musical fruit" thing, the answer lies in the oligosaccharides (complex sugars) contained in the beans, which are difficult to digest and, therefore, cause our body to produce gas. The rinsing and soaking helps get rid of these.